Maria Brito, MD, Director of the Mount Sinai Thyroid Center at Union Square, and Terry F. Davies, MD, Co-Director.
The Mount Sinai Thyroid Center at Union Square is a valuable new resource for patients with thyroid disorders, as well as physicians seeking referrals for complex cases. The Center is unique in gathering a wide array of services in one ambulatory facility.
“This collaborative center includes Endocrinology, Endocrine Surgery, Head and Neck Surgery, Pathology, and Radiology,” says Director Maria Brito, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine (Endocrinology, Diabetes and Bone Disease) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “I don’t think there is another thyroid center in Manhattan that has all of these services in one single building.” The Center is still expanding and will be joined by a Diabetes and Endocrine Center at Mount Sinai Union Square within the next year.
One goal of the Thyroid Center is to simplify care. “It is one-stop shopping, which is what we all want when we go to the doctor,” says the Center’s Co-Director, Terry F. Davies, MD, the Florence and Theodore Baumritter Professor of Medicine (Endocrinology, Diabetes and Bone Disease) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “If your physician says you need to see another specialist, it’s nice if he or she is in the next room. Y
ou can have your interview with the specialist and the surgeon; you can have a biopsy; you can have a sonogram; and you can have your blood tests, all in the same visit.”
New patients will be offered an appointment within 72 hours, Dr. Davies says, addressing a frequent complaint in medical care— having to wait weeks for an appointment.
Five endocrinologists and five surgeons are active in the Center, including leaders in their fields, Dr. Davies says, such as William B. Inabnet III, MD, Chair of Surgery, Mount Sinai Beth Israel, and Professor of Surgery at the Icahn School of Medicine; and Mark L. Urken, MD, Professor of Otolaryngology at the Icahn School of Medicine. For appropriate patients, “remote access” thyroidectomy can be offered, in which the thyroid is removed through incisions in the armpit or the mouth, leaving no visible scar on the neck. For certain patients with recurrent cysts, nodules, and some thyroid cancer recurrences, Dr. Brito and her colleague Michael A. Via, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine (Endocrinology, Diabetes and Bone Disease) at the Icahn School of Medicine, offer a minimally invasive option, ethanol ablation, in which an alcohol solution is injected into these lesions, causing reabsorption or destruction.
Additionally, the Center is the national headquarters of the Thyroid, Head & Neck Cancer (THANC) Foundation, founded by Dr. Urken. The nation’s largest private funder of research for these cancers, THANC administers the Thyroid Cancer Care Collaborative, a data registry in which physicians can record important data about their thyroid cancer patients, enabling them to share clinical information with their patients as well as de-identified data with other physicians and researchers.
The Center’s physicians work closely with peers across the Mount Sinai Health System. For example, “we meet twice a month for the thyroid tumor board, in which surgeons and physicians discuss difficult cases,” says Dr. Davies, a leading physician-scientist in autoimmune thyroid disease who has been funded continuously for 35 years by the National Institutes of Health. Sharing knowledge among peers is a top priority of the Center, which is an important referral destination for primary care doctors seeking to consult with endocrinologists, and for endocrinologists seeking to collaborate with surgeons.
“We think this is definitely an appropriate place for second, third, or fourth opinions,” Dr. Brito says. “But it is very important for both primary care doctors and specialists to know that we expect to collaborate with them. They will not lose their patient to the Center, instead, they will gain a colleague.”